Facebook Will Keep Violent Videos If they 'Raise Awareness'

There’s been a lot of discussion over the ethics of posting violent livestreams on Facebook, and the social media site has decided to release subjective guidelines: if a person posts violent content to “raise awareness,” the video can stay. If someone shared the same video to mock the victim, it will be removed.

This means that videos like that of the shooting of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black man from Minnesota, will stay up so long as people post solely about the injustice of the incident.

The problems (and potential controversies) surrounding content moderation will become even more delicate when it’s not just nudity that get moderated, but videos that show death in real time. With Facebook becoming a key source for news and Facebook Live rapidly becoming a tool to broadcast and publicise these brutal incidents, the judgement calls it makes on these videos are going to be more fraught than ever. [Facebook via BuzzFeed]